JUDAS PRIEST will launch the U.S. leg of its farewell world tour on October 12 in San Antonio and the band promises that it will go out with a bang. Singer Rob Halford said, “We’re pulling out all the stops. We’ve built a brand new stage set, we’ve got all the effects that people love us for — the lasers, the fire, the bombs, the smoke, new costumes, and the bike. It’s just a full-on metal extravaganza.”

Guitarist Glenn Tipton added that the group will play something from each of its albums, including a few numbers that have never been performed live before. “Obviously it’s the farewell world tour, so we’ve really gotta put a lot of the old favorites in there,” he said. “We got a lot of feedback from our web page, we requested what people really wanted to hear, so we put a set together based on that. Plus we’re playing at least one song from every album and we’re doing stuff that we haven’t played before, such as ‘Never Satisfied’, ‘Blood Red Skies’ and ‘Starbreaker’. So there’s a real mixed bag. Our mission, really, was to play at least song off each album each year and we tried to pick the songs that everybody wanted to hear. Obviously they’ll always want ‘Painkiller’, they’ll always want ‘Hell bent For Leather’. We’ve got so many songs, it’s really difficult to choose, and somebody is always disappointed. [But] I think we’ve covered most of them.”

As for whether this is really the end of JUDAS PRIEST‘s touring days, Tipton added, “We don’t plan on retiring. We’ve said that this is our last world tour. It takes a chunk out of your life — 18 months. We won’t be doing any more world tours as such and in many parts of the world, it will be the last time people will get a chance to see us. But we’re not gonna stop. We’ve got an album in the can now, we will start to write with Richie, there will be more albums, and who knows?! There might be a string of dates that we can manage to do. We’re just not gonna do another major world tour. We’ve been doing it for 40 years and it’s time to let the younger bands have the chance.”